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Start:     Mar 16, '05

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Boljoon: More Reasons to Return

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8 and 9 June 2007. When editor Kristin Llerin asked me to write about Boljoon for the Cebu Yearbook, I asked, "Why ME?". I'd just written an article on it a few months before for the Lifestyle page (supposedly, it was what inspired the Yearbook editors to feature Boljoon in the yearbook), and I felt I had written all I had in me to write about Boljoon, after years of yearning for it. I'd explored all I wanted to. It was a closed book, as far as I was concerned. "Because you like to travel!" she said. Fine. It was MY Boljoon, after all, so I thought it might as well be me. When I got there on a Friday morning (the first weekend of the schoolyear, and I was already on another "vacation" :P) to interview some government officials, I discovered that there was an archeological dig going on in front of its historic church, and that there were actually still a couple of places I hadn't been to...which some of the locals hadn't even heard of, eit...
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Meeting Marrakech

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04 a 06 de abril 2009. First time to set foot in Africa, and no less than in exotic Morocco, which is only a ferry ride away from Tarifa in Spain. Went with my Italian flatmate and his German friends. After quick visits to Tangier and Rabat, the capital city, we took the long train ride to Marrakesh, with its big square Djemaa El-fna populated with snake charmers, henna tattoo artists, musicians, and carts selling snail soup, spices, and nuts. All around the square were narrow, winding streets lined with Ali Baba's treasures--markets called souks with different streets for metalworks, carpets, leather, lamps, and everything else you've ever imagined you can find in an Arabic market. As expected, I thoroughly enjoyed the bargaining, just as they enjoyed the good fight. After the stern negotiations, we would smile, shake hands, and say goodbye. And always, they would ask where I was from. I'm afraid I've just created a reputation for Filipinos being barat :P But now, es...
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Finders, Seekers

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lost and found #37 by Jeneen R. Garcia to be published on 20 October 2007 (with new column pic at left ;)       It has been a year and five months since I left the routine of office work for a different way of living. And how different my life is now!   Two days of the week, I am in class, either teaching or being taught. Four days of the week, I am in the laboratory searching for tiny corals--one millimeter in diameter, sometimes smaller--that have settled on my experimental terracotta tiles. I fight my way through a jungle of filamentous algae, bryozoans, barnacles, sponges, and other encrusting marine critters, hoping to find the slightest sign of coralline growth.   Hour by hour, I run my thumb and forefinger along the surfaces of each tile as if it were the lip of a cherished lover, feeling intently for a certain fine sharpness that can only be the delicate skeletal structure of a baby coral. Now I can tell, from the look of the jungle-like growt...
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